Graphical user interfaces of mobile computing devices have controls that users may interact with, for example text fields a user may enter text in, buttons a user may click, icons a user may select, or radio buttons a user may select. Generally, for a user to interact with a control, the user's selection must substantially superimpose upon the displayed control. Due to the display size of many mobile devices, it may be difficult for a user to interact with controls in a distinctive manner. The controls may be small in size and located in close proximity. Thus, a user's selection may interact with an unintended control.
This problem is compounded for touch-display mobile devices (i.e., touch screen devices), such as smartphones (e.g., APPLE® IPHONE®, MOTOROLA® DROID X or other GOOGLE® ANDROID® based phones, etc.) or tablets (e.g., APPLE® IPAD®, AMAZON® KINDLE®, etc.). On touch-display mobile devices, a user's touch gesture must substantially superimpose upon the displayed control. This can make it difficult for a user to interact with controls on touch-display mobile devices. This is especially true for user interfaces that were not initially designed as content for touch-display mobile devices, for example legacy ADOBE® FLEX® or ADOBE® FLASH® applications and legacy web content. Further, even for content designed specifically for touch-display mobile devices, due to different users having varying touch gesture characteristics (e.g., fingerprint size, fingernail length, precision and consistency of a user's gestures, etc.), controls must generally be large and spaced apart from each other. This greatly reduces the number of controls and amount of other content that can be displayed to a user.
Some user interfaces aim to reduce this inconvenience by allowing a user to zoom in to assist a user with interacting with controls. For example, on an APPLE® IPAD® or APPLE® IPHONE®, a magnifying glass that allows a user to position the curser between intended letters is displayed when text is selected. This solution, however, may be distracting to a user and may result in a loss of context of the zoomed out content. For example, a user may accidentally select the wrong text field causing the user interface to zoom in on that text field. The user may then spend time entering text in the wrong text field in a zoomed in mode and not realize it was the wrong text field until the user zooms out again due to the loss of visibility of content surrounding the text field.
Additionally, rendering zoomed in content is processor intensive and, thus, negatively impacts the battery life of mobile devices. Further, design of user interfaces optimized for touch-display mobile devices, for example having large controls sufficiently spaced to allow convenient user interaction with touch gestures, requires significant amounts of time and effort from designers.